I didn’t cry when I read it at the funeral—I just recounted it blankly, almost phonetically. And after the funeral, my cousin Gaynor copied it out, and made it into a card, which she sent to everyone. I remember glancing at the photograph—a black-and-white picture of my nan looking joyful and beautiful with my cousin’s little boy, Sam, who’s all gorgeous with his curly hair.
“Ah, that’s so beautiful,” I exclaimed to myself, “she’s done it so tastefully, on that parchment paper.”
At that moment, my eye caught a crucial couplet early on in the poem, where “Damascus” should rhyme with “ask us,” but Gaynor had inadvertently left off the “us.” It wasn’t just the rhyme scheme this messed up, but all the stresses as well. Of course I had no option but to fly into a blind fury of artistic perfectionism—“Fuck! That’s wrong, that’s not my poem. How many copies of this have you sent out?”
Silly really.
On the day of the funeral, though, there were no such lapses in decorum on my part. In fact, it felt at the time like my transition to adulthood. In the poem I mention every member of 183
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Nan’s bloodline, which was a plea for them all to stick together,
’cos the family was falling apart.
We had to carry that fucking coffin through this huge grave-yard by a fl yover off the A13. I’ve never been back there since, but I’d like to. All that throwing dirt and stuff, so full of bleak pageantry. I gave my cousin James my jacket because he was cold, but I didn’t really feel the chill of the midwinter air, because my senses were overwhelmed by things that were much more powerful—like duty and family, and other pressing issues that I wouldn’t normally think about.
At one point, when I simultaneously ran out of money and girlfriends who were willing to be financially exploited, I even had to go and live back with my mum in Grays again for a while. I signed on with a temping agency, and they told me that there was work over Christmas assisting the postal service. I didn’t realize that the reason they needed assistance was because the postmen were on strike (not that I would probably have cared that much anyway, as my political sensibilities were still very much in their infancy at this stage).
I don’t think there was even an interview—you just went down and said you could do it, and started there and then. You didn’t even have to wear a uniform—which disappointed me a bit to be honest. A uniform might have made it easier for me to cope with the indignities of this form of labor. The first of these was that each morning my mum would drop me off with some sandwiches and a few premade joints in my lunchbox. Th is
made me feel slightly bad, ’cos I don’t think many other postmen in their early twenties were still getting dropped off at work by their mums.
No one ever wanted to have it off with me while I was being a Postie: this infuriated me. Unless the films of Robin Askwith are a complete fabrication (a possibility which I find too horrible 184
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to contemplate), then postmen should fall comfortably within the remit of casual early morning how’s yer father. And yet the entire time I was working for the postal service, not a single wanton housewife propositioned me.
As I tottered round the great big estates of Ockenden, trying not to come a cropper in the frosty ground in my dead slippery shoes, I would make the time pass more quickly by stealing some of the letters and packages. I thought that would lighten the mood.
When I made that confession previously in a brochure for forthcoming Channel 4 shows that was distributed free with the Evening Standard, someone in the Ockenden area tried to press charges saying that I could easily have been their postman. But unless they’re missing a Best of Frank Sinatra CD then it’s unlikely.
Down the end of one of the streets was a recreation ground or a rec as they’re commonly known in the Essex area, and perhaps the world over, for all I know. There was a group of men playing football and so I thought it would be nice to watch them for a moment or two, instead of just trudging onward with my breath freezing in front of my face. I paused, heart as heavy as my sack, laden with resentment and parcels of unfulfilled ambition, to watch their game.
They seemed to be quite good players these men—charging around on that chilly early morning pitch. At one point the ball came bouncing toward me, filling me with that immediate sense of dread which always accompanies this eventuality. If a ball comes in my dad’s direction in a park, he nimbly dances up to it and elegantly, with the side of his foot, sends the ball swooping back to its place of origin, like a footballing Enoch Powell cal-lously repatriating immigrants.*
* Enoch Powell was a potential Conservative Party leader, beloved by the right wing, who is famed for a speech where he said immigration would lead to rivers of blood in the streets 186
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When a football comes toward me, however, I know this precedes a moment of terrible embarrassment. I’ll either hoof it skywards, or step on it, or it’ll go between my legs. When it came toward me in this instance—although on the outside I was simply placing my sack on the ground, trying to act as nonchalant as possible—inside my head I was screaming, “Oh no, that ball is coming toward me, I’m about to be humiliated, here it comes, this is the moment of humiliation . . .”
Sure enough, I swept my foot into the ball with all my might and it skidded about eight inches in front of me. At the same instant as the man who was sprinting to receive a pass saw that he was going to have to come all the way toward me to retrieve the ball, he also noticed that I had a postbag. “Here, what are you doing watching football?” he demanded. “Why don’t you get on with your job? You fucking scab.” The other players, seeing the confrontation, soon began to join in the chorus of condemnation—“Yeah, you scab, get on with your fucking job.”
These men were striking postal workers, playing football to distract themselves from the harsh realities of industrial action, and while they were forgoing payment in a bid to improve their working conditions, I had stepped in to take their wages. I was embarrassed and frightened by my own naïveté. Th is further
reinforced my sense of not belonging to my own culture.
I was never very good at sustaining jobs—it always seemed a bit pointless, ’cos you never seemed to get the money for ages.
My mum was always on at me to get a paper round when I was younger, and I tried it for a bit, but I quickly realized that it was much easier just to throw the papers away. I had a job collecting of Britain. Apparently he’d deny himself a wee-wee to get all worked up before making a speech, then get on the podium and be all passionate and racist—bear this in mind if you ever have to speak at a wedding. Go to the loo before you start, particularly if the couple is from different racial backgrounds.
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for this hospital lottery once as well, but I just used to give them the bare minimum I could get away with and keep the rest of the money. I realize now how disgraceful that is, but I just didn’t have a work ethic, and if anyone ever challenged me on it I’d just quote George Bernard Shaw to the effect that “a true artist would see his family starve, rather than work at anything other than his art.”
My dad was (and is) a confident, masculine, working-class man, and Colin, while somewhat less ebullient, was still very much the embodiment of the big, heavy manual laborer—always working, always drinking. I presume that feeling os-tracized and alienated from them, even within my own home growing up, encoded within me a deep sense of alienation. Th at’s
why in any group dynamic my identity will always be defined as an outsider rather than from within.
This is also the reason why stand-up comedy is the perfect career for me. Not just because I’m constantly scribbling notes inside my own mind to deal with the embarrassment I perpetually feel, but also because I’m always observing, always outside.
It’s a perfectly natural dynamic for me to stand alone in front of thousands of people and tell ’em how I feel.
The fact that I’ve managed to make it funny is bloody convenient, because I can’t think how else I would make them listen. V
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21
Don’t Die of Ignorance
I got very close to Karl Theobald in that confused and anxious time after leaving Drama Centre. He comes from a working-class background in Lowestoft. He’s a real autodidact, who always knows loads about books, culture and art, and is very clever, quick and funny. He was my first comedic soul mate. Th ere was
a period when our impecunious circumstances even led us to share the same bed—like Morecambe and Wise, dreaming of better things.
It’s a shame that it has to be me that tells the following story,
’cos Karl always said he would tell it in his autobiography (though obviously the fact that I’ve got there fi rst doesn’t mean he won’t get the chance, and the more different angles people get to hear this from the better as far as I’m concerned). We were in bed reading Shakespeare together (oh yes, ours was a very cultural house hold).
At one point I broke away from the text and was just making stuff up as I went along, but Karl hadn’t realized and kept looking at the book, struggling to find out where those lines were coming from. Now obviously I’m not saying that I’m as good at improvising dialogue as Shakespeare was at writing it—that would be ridiculously conceited—but this story does seem to suggest as much. Just look at the evidence.
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It wasn’t all late-night Shakespeare readings and off- the- cuff brilliance, hanging out with me at that time, though. My egotism and the single-mindedness with which I pursued potential sexual conquests could often make me uneasy company.
Karl and I would often muse that in this secular age where man no longer believed in or devoted himself to God, salvation could only be sought through love, that love was a new religion—romantic love, devotion to the female, a return to pagan roots—and women were goddesses who could be saved through worshipping. Thus I was forever on my knees before women, hungrily devouring truth, seeking out redemption wherever it may lie—usually squandered between someone’s thighs.
After about six months to a year of working together, my alcohol and drug use and erratic behavior with women eventually drove Karl away. We didn’t have a formal falling out, we just sort of stopped phoning each other. I think it was partly the pressure of both being poor and me drinking too much and taking too many drugs. But either way, I adored him, and missed him terribly once we stopped working together.
That summer, I went up to Edinburgh with a group of students to do a series of short plays by the bloke who wrote Moon-struck, in a fifty-seater room. That was the first time I’d been to the festival, and I loved it. Me and this other guy who was in the play had a league to see who could pull the most women (I believe I won). There were lots of big parties we couldn’t get into, so we just kind of blagged our way around.
It was in the midst of these misadventures that I did my first solo open-mike spot, above an Edinburgh pub called Th e Blind
Poet. It lasted only seven minutes, and it was terrifying and difficult—even though there were only about fifteen people in the audience, most of whom were in the play that I was doing—but I loved it.
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I sat in a laundrette writing jokes about swans, which are quite a staple of the surrealist lexicon. When I finally performed the piece, I was every bit as scared as the first time I stepped on the stage as Fat Sam, but this time there was no character, no hat and no accent to hide behind—only me and material about swans (remember this is ten years ago: at that point no one had found out just how funny swans were; you could say I was a real pioneer).
My first gig was yet another profound epiphany—I’ve been lucky enough to have had several in my life. I hope I reach the point where epiphanies become so commonplace that I scarcely bother to register them: “Oh look, another epiphany—as we acquire knowledge we become mired in the ignorance of the educated, delivered from the wisdom of innocence by a corrupted midwife. Now what’s on telly?” (That’s probably why I put the stuff about Saul on the road to Damascus in my nan’s poem, because I recognized how it feels to suddenly be rendered holy and complete by a realization of the exact nature of your destiny.) Obviously doing Bugsy Malone as a kid was my main incidence of what Jack Kerouac called satori, but since I’ve been thinking about it, I’ve realized that there was probably one even earlier than that—when I had to read at a school poetry competition in the third year. The fact that this happened at all was probably down to Mr. Hannebury—this En glish teacher who would sometimes show me a bit of encouragement (when he wasn’t slamming his hand down on his desk and saying, “Russell, have you done your homework? No? Case proved!”). In my mind, he seems like a very worldly-wise, almost avuncular figure, but in reality he was probably younger than I am now.
The piece I read was called “The Nightmare before Christmas”
(I presume it was written by Richard Curtis, because it was in a Comic Relief annual). It had the word “bastards” in it, which they wanted me to change, and right up to the moment I read it, I 191
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thought I probably ought to say it anyway. In the end, I toned it down to “rotters,” or something similarly ridiculous. In a sense, I’ve never really forgiven myself for that—probably because somewhere within me I knew that when it came to tell the story in an autobiography, it would sound much better if I could write
“. . . and then I said bastards.”
But I suppose now I’ve managed to make a virtue of not saying it, so all’s well that ends well. Still, if you were looking for early motivation for my subsequent reluctance to censor myself in any way whatsoever, this would probably fit the bill. I came second in that contest (Ranjev Mitra won it, as he did every year—he was a thoroughbred when it came to that competition), but this was probably the first time I experienced that euphoric feeling—
“Thank God, there’s something I can do.”
I felt something like it again in 1994, when Channel 4 broadcast a tribute screening of Bill Hicks’s show “Revelations” at the Dominion Theater, and an accompanying documentary.
Seeing Hicks for the fi rst time (ironically, just after his death) affected me incredibly strongly. I thought he was extraordinary—a funny, powerful, poignant, passionate, clever, erudite, brilliant and moving man. And I watched that video so many times that I learned it off by heart.
I’d grown up on Blackadder, Fawlty Towers and Only Fools and Horses—rewinding my dad’s tapes and playing them again so many times that the rhythm of those programs is forever in-grained in my mind. I wasn’t madly into music growing up.
Comedy was my music, and the same way other people can always call upon the songs they loved as teenagers, the contours of my emotional landscape were shaped by lines of dialogue from minor characters in BBC sitcoms of the 1970s and ’80s.
As I started to get more interested in comedy, I began to feel the same way about Hancock, Peter Cook and Richard Pryor. I 192
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loved the fact that Pryor made big Hollywood films and did brilliant stand-up shows at the same time, because that’s what I wanted to do. I loved the iconography of Cook—the rakish bohemian sophisticate, who had seemingly achieved everything he wanted by his early twenties and then became bored of life, but still remained a beautiful, debonair genius. And I loved the way Tony Hancock perfectly articulated how miserable and out of place and bored and snooty I felt. But when I was taking my first tentative steps as a stand-up—a few years after I’d first seen him on TV—it was Bill Hicks’s confrontational—almost hectoring—style and radically politicized subject matter that were the clearest influences on what I was trying to do.
After that first experience at Edinburgh, I came back to London and started doing other open-mike spots at places like Th e
Purple Turtle, on Essex Road i
n Islington. I was cripplingly nervous, even when doing tiny five-minute spots. What the fuck can you do in five minutes in those bawdy loud rooms where people are hardly listening? It’s so fucking difficult. But even when I was waiting nervously in North London pub toilets, having diar-rhea and smoking grass to calm down, I could still cling onto a new sense of purpose.
I felt that I was finally in alignment: that at last I was doing what I was supposed to be doing. From this point onward, the seeds that had been planted in me with my endless hours of watching comedy videos could finally begin to germinate.
I’ve seen Matt Lucas talk about how angry Vic Reeves Big Night Out made him initially (I think he even made a complaint to Channel 4), but then he really grew to love it, and I was exactly the same.* I was about fourteen when the first series came
* Vic Reeves was, along with Bob Mortimer, part of a TV comedy double act from the early ’90s to present day, which was, in many ways, traditional, but in terms of content, 193
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on, and I thought, “What does he mean, ‘What’s on the end of your stick?’ What is this rubbish?” But then I watched a couple more and realized it was the most amazing thing in the world.
It’s funny and charming and specific in its language and its references. It taught me that you should never pick the first word people would think of, you have to train your mind to sift through the obvious stuff until you come to something that’s really funny. When Bob Mortimer came on Big Brother’s Big Mouth last year he referred to Mikey as “the perfumed laborer”: that’s just beautiful.
Around the time of those first stand-up gigs, I was going out with this girl called Josephine, whose dad was a high-court judge (I remember seeing him on the front of the Eve ning Standard once). I think she’s married to a rabbi now—I don’t like it when ex- girlfriends get married. I always think, “Come on, you never really ever got over me did you? That wedding—be honest with yourself, it was a sham.”
My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up Page 16
